Ed Sheeran: Bad Habits review a certain smash thats ready for the Weeknd – The Guardian

Spotify has chosen to promote Ed Sheerans new single by sitting it at the head of a playlist of his previous hits. The plays column of the latter makes for mind-boggling reading: the figures look less like streaming statistics and more like long-distance phone numbers. Every track is immediately recognisable you could have spent your every waking hour engaged in a dogged attempt to avoid the music of Ed Sheeran and youd still know exactly what they were and who they were by within seconds of them starting. Hes spent the last decade enjoying the kind of success that, in one sense at least, brooks no argument: even his loudest detractor couldnt argue against his ability to write one song after another that attains a weird kind of omnipresence, hits that evolve into inescapable facts of daily life.

This is not a state of affairs that Bad Habits looks likely to change. That Sheeran has trailed it as a surprise and mad tells you more about his innate populism than the song itself: its a well-written, extremely commercial pop song, cowritten by regular collaborators Fred Gibson and Snow Patrol guitarist Johnny McDaid, the latter of whom also had a hand in earlier Sheeran hits Shape of You, Photograph and Bloodstream.

His acoustic guitar is lower in the mix, the track is synth-heavy and propelled by a four-to-the-floor house beat, the lyrics have a stronger hint of the confessional about them than usual on the surface, it reads like a song in the vein of Sing or Shape of You, but the object of the narrators lust fairly clearly comes in a bottle or a wrap. However, anyone given to taking his pronouncements at face value should be warned that were not dealing with Trout Mask Replica here.

Its primary influence appears to be the Weeknds last album After Hours. The sound offers a similar glossy update of 80s dance-pop by way of Daft Punks take on house to that found on In Your Eyes or Save Your Tears; just as After Hourss biggest hit Blinding Lights gives every impression its about to turn into A-has 1985 chart-topper Take on Me, so the hook of Bad Habits has a distinct hint of Bronski Beats 1984 smash Smalltown Boy about it. You might also detect the Weeknds influence in its lyrical conflation of sex with wracked, compulsive hedonism.

But more than the Weeknd, what Bad Habits sounds like is an enormous, globe-swallowing hit, destined for a kind of ubiquity you might describe as Sheeran-esque.

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Ed Sheeran: Bad Habits review a certain smash thats ready for the Weeknd - The Guardian